I 'm always up by 4.30am on Saturdays and Sundays but this Saturday is different. Today I'm up and in the kitchen by 4am. In the summer, I allow myself one cup of tea with one spoonful of sugar in it, in the winter its two cups, but today there's only time for one – Wales are playing the All Blacks in Cardiff, there's a ticket tucked under the car keys and I need to get on.

Out in the yard the parlour lights are working, the cows are ready to be milked, but everywhere is in darkness.

The yard lights have tripped out. I know where the trip is, up on a beam in a cattle shed, so I go to find the torch.

We have quite a powerful rechargeable torch which has a usual place, but it isn't in its usual place, so it could be in any one of a hundred or so places and without any lights, how do I find it anyway?

I could get up the ladder in the dark and press the trip switch because I know exactly where it is but I can't find the ladder because I can't find the torch.

This isn't the good start to the day I was hoping for, so I decide to go back into the house and have that second cup of tea after all.

After contemplation I decide that I know my way around the yards sufficiently well to make a start on scraping up the slurry.

This is a very important job, as it keeps the cows' feet clean and if you keep the cows' feet clean, there's a fair chance that despite their best efforts, you can keep the beds where they lie clean.

Unfortunately, this most important job is done by the most neglected piece of machinery on the farm: the scraper tractor. This, for reasons of size and manoeuvrability, is usually very old (ours is over 50), but it's a faithful servant, much like today's driver, who is quite a lot older but also neglected.

Scraper tractors rarely have lights. I get on the tractor gingerly (we had a cat that used the scraper tractor seat as a toilet), and make sure it's clean. If I had a torch I could see but now I have to feel to see if it's OK – not the best solution but much better than sitting in it.

If only I had a spare torch.

I decide that there's enough light from the stars to make a start, so I fire the tractor up and move forward. At the first turn the steering is very heavy. In fact, I can hardly turn the wheel at all.

I get off and have a look at the front. Well I would have a look if I could see anything but a bit of a feel with my welly clad foot tells me one front tyre is as flat as a pancake.

I open the gate and the tractor limps out of the yard to await the tyre repair man – I bet he'll be pleased to come on a Saturday morning.

There's only one more job I can do now and that is to put fresh straw in the shed where we house 48 cows in a straw yard. The cows are at the parlour being milked and we like to get the straw in while they are away so that they have a clean bed to lie on when they come back – we also like to clean the slurry from where they feed but as you know, I don't have that option this morning. We have a machine permanently on a tractor that chops a big bale of straw and throws it into the shed.

It's customary to put the big bale on to the machine the night before and after wandering around the yard in the dark I find the tractor and machine, feel my way to the back and indeed, there is a bale already there.

It is also customary to remove the string from the bale but this hasn't been done. I do that and hope that I have all the string.

So I drive across to the shed and start blowing the straw in. I can't see if it's going in evenly but it is going in.

I've done some of the shed when there is a huge crash. I stop everything as quickly as I can, look down and there, in the light of the tractor's back light, I can see the drive shaft has disintegrated.

The kick off for the rugby match isn't until after five. I don't usually like these breaks from tradition, but today it will be very handy.

I decide to go back into the house for another cup of tea; I'll make a fresh start when it gets light.

■I know a man who has a hill farm where he keeps a few suckler cows and quite a lot of sheep. He lives alone but you never get the feeling he's lonely.

You don't see him about very often, he probably only leaves the farm only once a week to go shopping or to market. When he's lambing he probably doesn't go off the farm for a couple of months.

About this time of year he sells his cattle and he takes them the six miles or so in a trailer behind his tractor. It's a big day for him because he has two loads of cattle to take in. He can only get three or four at a time in the trailer so he could have anything between six or eight cattle to sell and the numbers will depend a bit on the size of the cattle and how they've grown this year.

I met him on the road yesterday and knew immediately what he was about. I slowed down as he passed me because it was something of a spectacle.

The tractor doesn't have a bonnet, so it had a sort of naked look to it. It doesn't have an exhaust, either.

He told me that it had broken down on the road and they had to remove the bonnet to affect the repair.

In a hurry to get his cattle to market he thought he'd put the bonnet on on the way home, but it was gone on his return.

You have to take the exhaust off to get the bonnet off. Because it has no exhaust it's very noisy but the driver wears ear muffs.

It's the front wheels that grab your attention – there's about a foot of play in them, so as he drives down the road they flap violently.

I doubt if there are lights or brakes but he only does about 10mph and all the other traffic slows down to have a look anyway. Good luck to him.

I used to have a poster on my bedroom wall with a poem by the Welsh poet R S Thomas about a tractor driver saying: "See him drive proudly up the lane."